Which classics are you reading now?

[Tim]

The Plague by Albert Camus. This is the first work of Camus' I have read since about 1978. I dreaded beginning the read as I have had mixed responses to his other works I've read including; The Stranger, The Fall, and Exile and the Kingdom. Having begun, The Plague, I am finding it difficult to put it down. Captivating.

[The Damsel in the Library]

I'm reading Jane Eyre for the first time and it's pretty good so far.

[Kenna]

The college I went to has a reading list for each year. I'm currently reworking my way through those books. The book I'm reading at the moment is the Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson in English and the original ancient Greek language. I studied ancient Greek in school :)

[Ian]

Kenna wrote: "The book I'm reading at the moment is the Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson in English and the original ancient Greek language. I studied ancient Greek in school "

Hi Kenna,

Wow reading in ancient Greek is pretty impressive! When we did the Odyssey back in 2019 as the Book of the Month, I kept wondering if "The child of morning, rosy fingered dawn appeared" rhymed in ancient Greek because the phase is used all through the book and seems a odd turn of phrase.

[anna ☆]

Hi guys! New to this group. I'm currently halfway through Anna Karenina! If you like existential crises I would definitely recommend Tolstoy. I'm just beginning to read Russian Lit but I have heard that all of them deal with dark themes. Actually, I was around the 40% mark of Anna Karenina where it was previously just a lot of exposition and stuff like "oh she cheated, blah blah blah," and all of a sudden you have Levin thinking "Oop. Death is inevitable and it makes all of what I'm doing right now pointless."

[La Tonya]

The Call of the Wild

[Sarah]

I am currently reading the classic nonfiction Wolf Willow: A History, A Story and A Memory of the Last Plains Frontier by Wallace Stegner ... I started to read this because of the horses in the cover. But it actually has some interesting things in it too. And the author points out something that I had never realized before. Growing up & going to school as a kid you learn the history of places far away & that you will never see but at the same time you dont learn the history of your own area (state or provence) because they dont teach it to you! Isnt that strange? I realize my schooling was the same! Learned all sorts of stuff about egypt and rome and greece and europe but nothing about my own state! Or which tribes live here or used to live here.

Originally published in 1962.

And he says places have a smell too. To him the smell of home is from a plant and that plant is called wolf willow. As a kid he never knew what had made the smell. Now he knows.

And so so many people have died in the area because of horse thieves! Apparently stealing horses had started battles too. Most of the book is about the history during pioneer / cowboy days.

And very weirdly the eastern horses did poorly eating the grass of the plains?? Why??? Modern day mustangs sure do good on it! Another mystery!

I will try to post more classic reads here. 😀
I was looking on the previous page and saw my old posts from the previous years .. Nice trip down memory lane. Seeing what I had read and my thoughts about it. Luckily I have LOTS of old books lying about and I guess sometimes I read odd stuff. Old but maybe not the popular stuff?

[Sarah]

I just finished reading Kitaro which I believe counts as a classic as the individual stories were published in Japanese back in 1967-1969. You could consider them early manga or use the american word of comic books. 😀 But I had loads of fun reading this incredibly fat "comic book" and in Japan this series IS considered a classic as everyone knows it apparently. Or that is what the book said anyway.

Basically its fun adventure stories about a one eyed boy who is half human & half monster. And he is a hero. He has to go fight other monsters so he can save the humans. Just loads of fun.

It was VERY relaxing reading this!

[Sarah]

I have just finished reading Medea and wow, what a story! I am shocked by the things that Medea has done in here. Especially the bit where she tricked the daughters to do that thing to their father! I mean I am used to reading horror but even in a horror novel I have never come across something like that so I am shocked its in this old classic? I do regret they didnt explain the WHY of it. The majority of the story was the aftermath so they had never explained why.

A very fast, easy read at 40 pages. No odd language.

All in all I think I enjoyed this one. ⭐⭐⭐⭐

PS: Medea is a witch!

[Gonzalo]

Of Mice and Men, my first Steinbeck, love the writting style so far

[Sarah]

I am reading Smoky the Cow Horse by Will James right now. It was published in 1925. A classic cowboy story about a horse. When I finish this one I'll have completed my reading challenge for this year. I am about a third of the way through and enjoying it! Great horse story!

[Susan]

Just finished The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton... overall most were not scary, but more contemplative.

[Sarah]

I just finished Pale Horse, Pale Rider : Three Short Novels : Old Mortality, Noon Wine, Pale Horse Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter ⭐⭐⭐

It contains 3 stories: Old Mortality, Noon Wine & Pale Horse Pale Rider.

I had liked Noon Wine the best. Its a character driven story and it moves at a good pace. Then it has a big twist and a shocking ending! Its about a very quiet, hard working man on a dairy farm and then a stranger shows up to ruin everything - I think the theme in here is Truth.

Pale Horse Pale Rider is set during a flu pandemic & WW1. Found this slow and not interesting.

Old Mortality was rather mixed up for me but I figured out its about that famous relative you have and everyone gossips about the person - so many rumors but what is true? So its about the Truth.

[Sarah]

I am now reading the classic Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis which I must admit I had never heard of. I have the whole trilogy here so hopefully it will be good. I am about 60 pages in and liking it so far.

[Estelle Zenith]

I'm currently reading El Filibusterismo and even though I am reading the English version, there's still some terms that I HAVE to lookup, some of which are either spanish or dated. Thankfully I'm reading it on a kindle.

[Patrick]

Currently reading two classic adventure novels. One is Russell Thorndike’s Doctor Syn: A Smuggler Tale of the Romney Marsh, the first of a series although the subsequent volumes are all prequels. It was famously adapted in the Sixties as The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, with Patrick McGoohan, which exists in both feature film and mini-series versions.

The other is J. Meade Falkner’s Moonfleet, which like Dr. Syn is about seacoast smuggling, and also has affinities with Kidnapped and Lorna Doone.

[Patrick]

Just finished and highly recommended: Edna Ferber’s Come and Get It. Having greatly enjoyed the 1936 movie version, I took up the novel and was interested to discover that it is very different in many respects and covers a much longer time-span than even the two generations of the movie. A rich and wonderful reading experience, completely absorbing. One startling development that is not in the film knocked me right off my chair.

I especially relate to this novel because I have lived on its Northern Wisconsin turf. “Butte des Morts” is Neenah in the northeast, close to where I resided in Little Chute. “Iron Ridge” is Hurley in the northwest, the great northwoods area that I often visited. The timber and paper industries are at the core of the narrative.

Ferber is adept at what critics call “solidity of specification”, description of exterior elements as in Balzac. You always know how the rooms are furnished, how the characters are dressed. (I was surprised to have it pointed out that Trollope, even writing at the length he does, doesn’t much bother with this, and it is true.)

[Patrick]

Reading this morning in Plutarch’s Lives, the Dryden / Clough translation in the old Modern Library Giant edition. Now that’s as classical as it gets. Long sentences with many clauses, you really have to pay attention. I like this quotation about empire: “And indeed there was nothing did more advance the greatness of Rome, than that she did always unite and incorporate those whom she conquered into herself.”

Along with books such as Plutarch, one might take a look at Moses Hadas’s helpful guide Ancilla to Classical Reading.

[[deleted user]]

I read Animal Farm for the third time. As a writer I am reminded of just how powerful stories can be when used correctly.
I wrote a literary review of it, link is in my GR bio.
And since then I've been binging on dystopian classics: A Brave New World, 1984, The Handmaid's tale series.

[Patrick]

Arthur van Schendel’s John Company (1932), one of the many fine Dutch novels of the colonial East Indies, is “impersonal” in the sense that the Dutch East India Company of the 17th Century is the true protagonist, and not any individual, although the story of adventurer Jan de Brasser provides a through-line. Van Schendel’s approach is original - he gives a comparatively dry and objective-sounding account of “goings-on” in Dutch Indonesia without any conventional plot as such. John Company is not like other novels, and all the better for it.

Among the other novels of this history that I would recommend are Louis Couperus’ The Hidden Force by Louis Couperus, Multatuli’s Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, and Maria Dermout’s The Ten Thousand Things.

[Patrick]

Of the 19th Century British novelists who figure in the standard histories, Charles Reade (1814-1884), a good friend of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, is one of the least-read today. He is best known for an uncharacteristic production, the historical novel The Cloister and the Hearth, but essentially he was a contemporary social fiction writer who was all over the hot-button issues of his day, and quite a bit of a muckraker. I greatly admired the first Reade that I read, It is Never Too Late to Mend, which achieves considerable power in its pictures of English prison life and the Australian goldfields. I just started Put Yourself in His Place, an industrial labor novel set in Sheffield (“Hillsborough”).

[Patrick]

Robert Smith Surtees has been pigeon-holed as a fox-hunting novelist, and perhaps partly because of that, has never "boomed," as the critic Edward Wagenknecht once pointed out. But Wagenkecht also astutely notes that it is easy to enjoy Surtees even if one thoroughly disapproves of hunting, because he excels at comic characterizations.

Surtees' slangy language is very dense for us and takes some getting used to; some references will be missed by non-specialists. But he is a joyously high-spirited writer, which is immediately noticeable and sustained me through the early going while I was getting used to the style. By the 100-page mark, I was reveling in the entire performance.

The book I chose for my initiation was Surtees' first, Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities. The Hunting, Shooting, Racing, Driving, Sailing, Eccentric and Extravagant Exploits of That Renowned Sporting Citizen Mr. John Jorrocks, not a novel but a collection of fictional sketches that first started appearing in the New Sporting Magazine (which Surtees co-founded) in 1831, and that were gathered between hard covers in 1838. (The Pickwick Papers, very obviously influenced by Jorrocks' adventures, had made Charles Dickens' reputation in the meantime.)

John Jorrocks is a rumbustious Cockney grocer whose character develops over a number of Surtees' fictions, but at the beginning he is pretty much a flat-out idiot, though not lacking in a certain crude charm. At his social level, he is clubbable; his friends enjoy him, for his inanities as much as anything else. And every now and then amidst much foolish chatter he comes out with a bit of down-home wisdom: " - so come without any ceremony - us fox-hunters hate ceremony - where there's ceremony there's no friendship."

Only the first few of the 13 sketches in JJ & J are really hunting pieces; after that, Surtees starts to vary the game, so that we get Jorrocks at the seaside, Jorrocks on excursion in France, Jorrocks throwing a dinner party, and so on. Abundance of ingestion is a running theme; the man eats like one of his horses. He also dandies himself up as much as possible, doing his best to be a "man of mode" despite having (to put it mildly) no gentlemanly or intellectual qualifications.

But elan vital, now that he's got. And if Surtees can't help satirizing Jorrocks, he also admires him for the sheer life-force he represents; appetite for hunting, for food, for nice togs translates easily into appetite for life in general.

Like many a vigorous fellow, Jorrocks feels himself hobbled by his wife, which lends a good deal of marital comedy to the book's later passages: " - wish to God I'd never see'd her - took her for better and worser, it's werry true; but she's a d----d deal worser than I took her for."

In short, if you have any winking fondness for vulgarity at all, Jorrocks is your man, and you ought to make his acquaintance.

[Patrick]

Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno / Sylvie and Bruno Concluded is not exactly a work you recommend so much as point out, because honestly, one in 500 people is going to care for this level of extreme eccentricity. Melville’s Mardi: and a Voyage Thither and Robert Browning’s Sordello are two other productions in this same WTF? class. However, it should go without saying by now that I am very fond of all these and similar demented creations. 😏

Sylvie and Bruno uneasily combines a daft fantasy with a realistic late Victorian novel, and ladles on the sentimentality in a way that many now find unappealing. But all that said, it is QUITE an experience. I even find Bruno’s oft-criticized baby talk very funny. ("I never talks to nobody when he isn't here! It isn't good manners. Oo should always wait till he comes, before oo talks to him!")

[Patrick]

This morning, finished D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (which really should be called Men in Love with Each Other). Well, that was quite something. Although I would acknowledge it as a major novel, one dominant impression that I had is that all four main characters are repulsive, and I possibly won’t mind spending any more time with them. That is very rare for me to say. (I didn’t feel that way at the end of The Rainbow, preceding.)

Lawrence does not offer a very comforting view of romantic relations. Constant tension, out of which comes an occasional hot tumble, about which Lawrence himself gets mystically (sometimes near-ludicrously) worked up. There are few novels in which the protagonists yammer so much about what their relationships MEAN; one wants to slap them sometimes. And as if to serve them right for being over-analytic…well I shouldn’t say, but without going into spoilers I can point out that one NEVER feels that a “happy ending” is in the offing.

The novel never stops being compelling, though. I wanted to throw it at the wall, yes, but then pick it right up again. 🙂

I hadn’t read much Lawrence before The Rainbow, a few short stories and poems way back when. Now I shall move on to Sons and Lovers.

[Patrick]

Oh man. You thought Ulysses was difficult, but I assure you it has NOTHING on Robert Browning’s knotty narrative poem Sordello (1840), about 13th Century Italian politics and troubadouring. I used Arthur J. Whyte’s 1913 annotated edition - very helpful it was and very grateful I was for the help. But still, a tough go, lightened by beautiful lines and passages, but the difficulties always remain in view: Like, what is going on, what IS he talking about? Nonetheless, for true hardcore littérateurs, I unhesitatingly recommend.

Browning interrupts his narrative at the mid-point for a 400-line digression discussing whether he will finish it, which is not merely a modern but indeed a post-modern gesture, and has to be considered one of the most striking such oddities in any 19th Century text.

[Patrick]

I’m currently reading The Diary of John Quincy Adams: 1794-1845, a selected (but long) edition edited by Allan Nevins in 1951. JQA is an interesting case because he appeared to dislike politics and public life, frequently stating his preference for being a reader, writer, and scholar; yet when he had a chance to do that, after his Presidency and in his early 60s, he launched right back into a nine-term career as a US Representative that took him to his death at age 80. It is theorized that he suffered from depression, and he consistently seems to have sought out whatever conditions would make him most miserable. The family mantle always weighed heavily on him * , and although one might find his sense of public service admirable, he was privately quite cynical about political life and constantly frustrated by it. It is not just that he couldn’t achieve what he wanted through politics - that is common - but he took no pleasure in the process, as the more extroverted can. Meeting with supplicants, for example, was profoundly tedious for him.

So the effect of the diaries which he assiduously kept is sad, but also stimulating because he was a man of genuine cultivation and always “in the thick of things”.

* Not just on him. His oldest son committed suicide at 28, and his second son drank himself to death by 31.

[Patrick]

Years ago I was supposed to read the entirety of Boswell’s Life of Johnson for a course, but I was taking four graduate-level English classes and one education class that semester, plus teaching part-time, so I only managed excerpts. But I promised myself that I would get back to the text, and so I have, now halfway through the Oxford unabridged edition. A complete joy.

I will always be grateful that I got an excellent grounding in 17th and 18th Century British literature as an undergrad at Yale, so I have a head start on Boswell because the context and personalities are familiar.

[Andrey]

I'm going through Mikhail Bulgakov's plays, including lesser known ones. For some reason it's his least known ones that are the most interesting, including unpublished editions.

[Sharon]

I'm reading The Warden by Anthony Trollope. Very enjoyable. Great characters, especially Mr. Harding who I want to take home with me.

[Mary]

𝙸 𝚑𝚊𝚍 𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚍 𝚊𝚗𝚒𝚖𝚊𝚕 𝚏𝚊𝚛𝚖 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚎𝚗𝚓𝚘𝚢𝚎𝚍 𝚒𝚝.